Sophie Scholl
October 29, 2005 6:01 PM   Subscribe

Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose, was beheaded in 1943. Her crime? Being brutally honest with a brutal regime. Her punishment was death. It's now a film, Sophie Scholl, the Last Days. I'm looking forward to seeing this. Finally Germany is showing great films.
posted by movilla (26 comments total)
 
Finally Germany is showing great films.

What? I think maybe a couple great films came out of Germany before 2004.
posted by cloeburner at 6:41 PM on October 29, 2005


Yeah, I don't understand the poster's comment either. Looks like this might be a good film though...
posted by cbrody at 6:53 PM on October 29, 2005


A true hero.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 6:54 PM on October 29, 2005


There's a reference to Sophie Scholl at the very end of Downfall, in the shots lifted from Blind Spot: Traudl Junge, real-life secretary of Adolf Hitler, half-heartedly defends her actions with her youth, but then she halts when she realizes that Sophie Scholl was the same age at the time..... I'm excited about this film too; Julia Jentsch was great in The Edukators.
posted by muckster at 7:56 PM on October 29, 2005


Die Weiße Rose wasn't too shabby a film.
posted by Rothko at 8:37 PM on October 29, 2005


That's putting it mildly.
posted by Dareos at 9:08 PM on October 29, 2005


Rush Limbaugh keeps the black hood in his bedroom closet, and close to his heart.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 9:24 PM on October 29, 2005


What? I think maybe a couple great films came out of Germany before 2004.

Only a couple?
posted by Goblindegook at 9:38 PM on October 29, 2005


Thanks, movilla. I'd never heard of The White Rose before, and it's a very moving story. Here's the text of the pamphlets.
posted by maryh at 9:46 PM on October 29, 2005


By coincidence, earlier today I ran across an IMDb page for The White Rose, an American movie which should be released next year.
posted by stopgap at 9:46 PM on October 29, 2005


The pamphlets are really powerful, especially with the perspective of hindsight.
posted by Jon-o at 10:11 PM on October 29, 2005


Will the movie play in the UK (or the US) I wonder?
posted by cbrody at 11:00 PM on October 29, 2005


The German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made some politically charged films in the 70s and early 80s that are worth viewing, including his BRD Trilogy, made up of Veronika Voss, Lola and The Marriage of Maria Braun. One of his earlier films, Angst essen Seele auf, which literally means "Fear eat Soul" addresses the issue of foreign guest workers in Germany and their isolation through its portrayal of a love relationship between a German woman and a Moroccan.
posted by vkxmai at 11:12 PM on October 29, 2005


I'd also like to point out Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorbei, which I found to be much more enjoyably than the overrated Goodbye, Lenin (same lead actor though).
posted by allen.spaulding at 12:17 AM on October 30, 2005


I went to see it when it came out here in Germany earlier this year. Highly recommended, IMO even better than Downfall.
posted by uncle harold at 1:31 AM on October 30, 2005


> Rush Limbaugh keeps the black hood in his bedroom
> closet, and close to his heart.

It's on the very next shelf to his white hood. He wears them alternate nights.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 2:36 AM on October 30, 2005


The German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made some politically charged films in the 70s and early 80s that are worth viewing

WTF? That's like saying "Francis Ford Coppola made some crime-related films that are worth viewing" or "Nabokov wrote some butterfly-mentioning novels that are worth reading." Fassbinder was one of the great directors of the twentieth century, and his films are no more "politically charged" than anybody else's (I'd love to know what's political about The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and don't tell me about sexual politics); he's essential viewing for anyone who cares about movies.

That said, yeah, "Finally Germany is showing great films" is a dumb remark (and, since the poster hasn't even seen the movie he's touting, an unwarranted one).
posted by languagehat at 5:30 AM on October 30, 2005


...not to mention everything by Herzog and Wenders. And don't forget Michael Haneke, early Wolfgang Petersen...not to mention that the word "showing" rather than "making" in the FPP is either weirdly irrelevant or nonsensical, depending on how you read it. Did anyone mention Murnau....?
posted by bingo at 6:23 AM on October 30, 2005


The "Finally Germany is showing great films" remark is not so dumb. Pre-WW2 Germany was a major cinematographic power. The post-WW2 period has been more sketchy. The 70s (and early 80s) saw a number of great, successful, often visionary movies by a small group of directors (Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlondörff, Wenders, von Trotta).

Fassbinder died, the others went to shoot internationally-themed movies everywhere except in Germany (Wenders came back briefly for his Wings of Desire films). A few others (Wolfgang Petersen) were sucked in the Hollywood machine and there's still a steady flow of young German directors going to work there.

The recent decades have seen German movies completely disappear from the foreign markets, with odd exceptions like Adlon's Bagdad Cafe (that few people would recognise as "German" anyway). However, in the last 5 years we've seen coming from Germany movies with German themes that happen to be interesting for non-German audiences, and that is a good thing. So, while the general wording was awkward, there's something of a renewal in German cinema, at least from a non-German perspective.
posted by elgilito at 6:40 AM on October 30, 2005


Fritz Lang? Leni Riefenstahl? Volker Schlöndorff? May Spils? Here's my list of favorite German films.
posted by muckster at 6:45 AM on October 30, 2005


elgilito, I pretty much agree with you about German cinema not being as compratively strong during the past 20 years or so. But that still means that without "again" at the end, "Finally Germany is showing great films" is, indeed, dumb.
posted by cloeburner at 7:20 AM on October 30, 2005


Die Fetten Jahre sind Vorbei = The Edukators. Other very good recent German films: Fatih Akin's Head-On, Hirschbiegel's Das Experiment, anything by Tom Tykwer.
posted by muckster at 7:21 AM on October 30, 2005


side note but bingo, Michael Haneke = Austrian, not German.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of Germany now. The economy is so broken, and yet there are a few major pushes to make things happen. Indeed, the comment about Germany not making great films is ignorant, but I wonder if geniuses like Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder will emerge.

Also, worth noting that Our Own Hal Hartley has taken his ball and gone to Berlin, and is operating from there now. It's so cheap to live there and to get things done there, that something may bubble up, not unlike New York in the 50s or 70s.
posted by cloudscratcher at 8:19 AM on October 30, 2005


CBrody, the film is currently playing in the UK albeit in only a few cinemas. I saw it tonight in the UGC off Picadilly Circus in London.

Elgilito is correct in analysing my comment. There's been few German films to come to the UK this past while that has been of the style of Sophie Scholl and Downfall. There's an appetite to know more about Germany during the war from the point of Germans.
posted by movilla at 2:04 PM on October 30, 2005


When I was in Munich recently, I think I saw a monument to Sophie... it was a black (granite?) cube with the contents of a letter etched onto it. As I don't speak German, I couldn't understand what it said, but I remember Sophie's name being on it. Can anyone tell me any more about it?
posted by krunk at 3:59 PM on October 30, 2005


This photo gallery has pictures of a cube that could be black granite, but the side in the photo has a picture of the white rose. Here's a black plaque with writing (translated in the main gallery link), but it's not a cube. Pamphlets and biographical sketches are embdedded in the street.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:21 AM on October 31, 2005


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